Palo Alto Networks: Twitter Usage Soars in the Enterprise

The news from Palo Alto Networks reinforces what we should probably expect will be the norm for the foreseeable future. According to the company's Application Usage and Risk Report, social technologies and collaborative applications are moving deep into the enterprise with Twitter seeing a 250 percent increase in use since Spring of last year.

In face of a report like this, it makes sense that Enterprise 2.0 technologies would be a fit for companies. Employees understand how social technologies function. Collaborative applications make sense for getting the work done.

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Here are some more results from the Palo Alto study:

• Sharepoint adoption increased 48 percent compared to last year.
• Google Docs showed up in 82% of the organizations, compared to 33% a year ago. Bandwidth increased 290 percent since spring of this year.
• Facebook increased 59 percent when measured by the frequency in which it was detected on corporate networks. Organizations saw big bumps in bandwidth consumption, increasing 294 percent to 6.3 gigabytes per organization.

The study comes in the wake of a number of announcements, most notably from Cisco, which seems to have an understanding of the social network dynamics at play in the enterprise. At a press conference on Monday, John Chambers outlined a number of initiatives.

Notable were his insights into how collaboration is the best way to quickly invent new products and enter new markets. He said this is especially true with younger workers entering the workforce. Young people are familiar with social networking and increasingly see it is the best way to foster collaboration.

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